Thoughts on the Miraculous

In a Yemenite Midrash by the 15th‑century sage Choter ben Shmuel, the author addresses us directly:

“Dear reader of this derash, know that the scholars have set boundaries for us within that which exists, beyond which we cannot pass. And there is a law violated only by one who wishes ‘to rise up to the heavens or descend to the depths of the sea.’ Such a person believes things that are impossible. He exercises free choice — ‘each person has the ability’ — and becomes excited, saying, ‘Praise to God who created this thing!’ But only the imagination creates impossible things.”

In Choter’s major work, Siraj al‑Uqal, known to us only in fragmentary manuscripts he, much like Maimonides, reads the biblical narrative through metaphor and allegory. He frowns on attempts to inject miracles into the text that violate the natural order. Unlike Alice’s White Queen, who could believe six impossible things before breakfast, Choter prefers rational explanations for passages that stretch our credulity.

By contrast, the sages of the Talmud and Midrash do not hesitate to offer miraculous, even unbelievable explanations for difficult texts, interpretations that go far beyond the boundaries Choter describes. For example, faced with the improbable population growth of the Israelites in Egypt from seventy souls who arrived with Jacob to 600,000 men during the Exodus, in just a few generations, the rabbis famously claim that the Israelite women gave birth to sextuplets at every pregnancy. Likewise, not content with rational explanations for the ten plagues, they embellish each one with additional wonders. In the plague of hail, for example, Moses stops the hailstones in mid‑air. The Torah says only that the hail “did not reach the ground,” but the sages imagine those same hailstones suspended above the earth for forty years until Joshua needed them, at which point they resumed their descent and destroyed the Amorites.

One can seek rational explanations for these events or simply sit back and enjoy the rabbinic storytellers who spin these wondrous tales. But from what little I have read of Yemenite midrash, it seems that these sages, whose literature exists primarily in still‑untranslated Judeo‑Arabic, preferred to understand the Torah and the teachings of the rabbis as works of philosophy, using symbolic language to convey their ideas.

I was led into this previously unexplored area of Jewish learning by a difficult passage in last week’s Torah portion, Beha’alotcha. The Torah describes the consecration of the Levites, who replace the firstborn Israelites after the sin of the Golden Calf. Moses is instructed to sprinkle water of purification over them, have them shave their entire body, and bathe in preparation for this ceremony. After their offerings are brought, Moses assembles the entire community, brings the Levites forward “before the Lord,” and the Israelites lay their hands upon them, indicating that the Levites are being offered up by all of the people to God’s service. Then Aaron is told to raise them up as a tenufah offering. This is impressive, until one looks closely. What exactly is tenufah? What does it entail? Earlier in the Torah, tenufah refers to a “wave offering.” Portions of a shelamim offering are placed in the hands of the priest and waved forward and back, up and down, much like a lulav on Sukkot. The same is true for the Nazirite’s offering, the omer, and the two loaves on Shavuot. Tenufah dramatizes the idea that what is offered is first given to God and then returned for human use. It marks the object as set apart for a sacred purpose and it acknowledges God’s sovereignty in all directions. But what does it mean for Aaron to “wave” the Levites? Is he expected to pick up each Levite and wave him back and forth, up and down? Aaron is 84 years old. There are 22,000 Levites. How is he supposed to accomplish this in a single day? Moses, only slightly younger, is also involved in this process. I turned to the traditional commentaries and early midrashim, and nearly all say that this is indeed what Aaron did. They praise his extraordinary strength, some adding that God miraculously endowed him with superhuman stamina. I felt like the White Queen again, trying to believe six impossible things before breakfast. So, I turned to Torah Shelemah, Rabbi Menachem Kasher’s monumental collection of midrashic sources. Most of the midrashim he cites accept the impossible interpretation. But tucked between them was a single sentence from a work entitled Maor ha‑Afelah (A Light in the Darkness), a 14th‑century Yemenite commentary by Rabbi Netanel ben Yeshaya, preserved in manuscript in the Bodleian Library. Rabbi Netanel, another of the rationalist Yemenite thinkers, writes simply: “The waving of the Levites was not like the other wavings of sacrificial offerings. Rather, he [Aaron] would lead them through the courtyard, and the song would play before them.”

Instead of reaching for an impossible interpretation, he imagines a stately investiture: Aaron leading the Levites in procession into the courtyard of the Tabernacle, symbolically presenting them before God as music accompanies their entrance. In this way, they are inducted into their primary role as choristers in the Temple ritual through dignity, not defiance of physics. We might assume that Rabbi Netanel bases his commentary on Rabbi Saadya Gaon’s tenth century Arabic translation of the Torah which uses different words to translate tenufah when speaking of animal sacrifice from the one used for tenufah of the Levites. Animals are lifted and waved; humans are led and presented. Encountering this Yemenite midrash reminded me that our tradition is not a single voice but a chorus. Some voices sing of miracles; others sing of reason. Some lift us into the clouds; others keep our feet on the ground. Maybe that is exactly what we need. A faith that can hold both the soaring imagination of the rabbis and the grounded clarity of the philosophers. A Judaism that can believe in wonders without abandoning wisdom and embrace wisdom without extinguishing wonder.

When we read Torah with both of these voices in our ears, we discover that the text is larger than either one alone. And so are we.